Interviews, first-person essays, and profiles about
people in a wide variety of fields which pertain to
this special topic of High-Temperature
Superconductors.

OVERVIEW

High-temperature superconductors are materials with a superconducting
transition temperature greater than 30 K. Because these materials were
thought to be insulators rather than conductors, their discovery in the
1980s by Alex Müller and Georg Bednorz made the research community
buzz with excitement.

This month, ScienceWatch.com examines the literature on
high-temperature superconductors. Our search was based on a long string of
keywords of original
articles, review papers, and proceedings papers published between January
1, 1999 and February 28, 2009.

To generate a more on-point list of the top 20 papers over the past decade
and over the past two years, we further restricted these papers to the
contain the keywords "superconduct*" in the title.

The most-cited paper over the past decade in this subset is the 1999
Reports on Progress in Physics paper, "The pseudogap in
high-temperature superconductors: An experimental survey," by Tom Timusk,
Professor Emeritus at McMaster University, and the late Bryan Statt, who
was a professor at the University of Toronto.

Other topics covered in the top 20 papers include photoemissions studies,
pairing symmetry, magnetic properties, fluctuating stripes, tunneling
effects, currents, and electric power applications. Cuprates and yttrium
superconductors are the most discussed in this set of papers.

The two-year list of papers deals with such subjects as the Nerst effect,
quantum criticality, impurity-induced states, superconducting wires, pair
formation, photoemission spectra, energy gaps, and electronic spectra. The
superconductive abilities of a variety of materials are also explored,
including SmFeAsO1-xFx, LaO1-xFxFeAs, copper oxides, gadolinium-arsenide
oxides, YBCO, and BSCCO.

Details: It should be noted that this analysis has been
corrected, as the original analysis posted in February was found to be
lacking in terms of an accurate picture of the field. The decision was made
to streamline the keywords and include proceedings papers in order to
improve the quality of the analysis.

Papers: To construct the top 20 papers lists for the past
decade and the past two years, the papers were further narrowed down by the
title keyword "superconduct*." This adjustment resulted in
the top 20 papers being selected from a pool of 3,314 (10 years) and 706 (2
years) papers.

Rankings: Once the database was in place, it was used to
generate list of authors, journals, institutions, and nations. Rankings for
author, journal, institution, and country are listed in three ways:
according to total cites, total papers, and total cites/paper. The paper
thresholds and corresponding percentages used to determine scientist,
institution, country, and journal rankings according to total cites/paper,
and total papers respectively are as follows: